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The Burkiss Way : Good Quality

Topics: Old Time Radio, Radio Programs

Language: English

Item Size: 3.3G

UPDATED: 12 September 2025*

*see foot of page for details

The Burkiss Way : Complete. All episodes including the 2-part Pilot Show.

Radio comedy sketch show. Starring Chris Emmett, Nigel Rees, Fred Harris, Denise Coffey and Jo Kendall. Sketches written by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick.

Good quality recordings. Includes some in Broadcast Quality at 320 Kbps.

Chris Emmett (a.k.a. Eric Pode of Croydon!) co-starred for 25 years with Roy Hudd in the sketch comedy The News Huddlines and other shows (including Huddwinks and Crowned Hudds).

Nigel Rees became well known as deviser and host of the long running radio panel game Quote Unquote.

Fred Harris may not be well known to fans of British radio comedy as he worked mainly in television, where he's perhaps best remembered from Play School.

Jo Kendall is the sexy girl from the cult Sixties sketch comedy I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again.

Co-writer David Renwick went on to great success in television, as creator and writer of the sitcom One Foot in the Grave featuring the perpetually grumpy Victor Meldrew, and the even more surreal mystery series Jonathan Creek starring Alan Davies.

The Burkiss Way is a comedy largely based on puns. Each broadcast (known as a "lesson") is a collection of sketches, but these blend into each other in a stream of surrealism in the tradition of The Goon Show and I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, but reaching even greater depths of absurdity.

Many of the later programmes have a remarkably complex structure, as the show temporarily leaves one sketch to join another, often returning to the original sketch much later in the programme. A programme might be dropped on the floor and broken, only to be reassembled in the wrong order; or the closing credits might appear at the start of the show, which would then work its way methodically backwards to finish at the beginning of the script.

The full title of the show is The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living, with each episode supposedly being one in a course of forty-seven lessons presented by Professor Burkiss, teaching listeners how to achieve that dynamic state.

The episode of Series 3 known as Bruce's Choice and Start New Series the Burkiss Way is a single episode masquerading as two half-episodes, the first of which pretends to end the current series, while the second pretends to begin another. This was not inconvenient for the BBC at the time, who originally designated the show only by numbering the 47 broadcasts consecutively, as "lessons" 1 to 47.

To preserve listeners' sanity, I have adopted the BBC's approach and ignored this artificial division. The BBC and I treat the third series as a single set of 14 episodes. Otherwise, one of the half-hour broadcasts would have to be assigned to both of two different series, one of which would comprise only three (actually, only two and a half!) broadcasts...

To further muddy the waters, there are two broadcasts labelled Lesson 39, both of which are entitled Repeat Yourself the Burkiss Way, and which both have identical beginnings. This may have seemed a funny joke when written down! It certainly adds no clarity to this weird show.

This preservation project is fraught with difficulties. In addition to the matters mentioned above, the project is further complicated by BBC cuts and bans that go back a long way (with thanks to Darren Lee for providing these details).

After the show's original run, two of the episodes were censored on their very first repeat, namely Lessons 28 and 47, all repeats of which are cut, although the cuts to Lesson 47 were restored in 2009 (on some repeats only: see the additional notes on Lesson 47, below). Altogether, four broadcasts present particular problems, as follows.

Lesson 6 (Win Awards the Burkiss Way) : A "banned" episode. Never broadcast on BBC 7 nor subsequently, it is not lost nor wiped: the episode was issued on CD with the rest of Series 1. Seemingly it was "too difficult" to create a suitable timeslot for repeating the episode, which is much shorter than all the rest of the series (15 minutes only).

Some recordings of Lesson 6 wrongly include an "orphaned" sketch, parodying a speech by 1950s British prime minister Harold Macmillan. That sketch should not be included in the episode. It talks about Harold Wilson as prime minister, who resigned as the Labour Party's leader in March 1976, but Lesson 6 did not air until October 1976.

Radio Times magazine scheduled the original broadcast in a 15 minute timeslot, indicating the Macmillan sketch (which runs 2 minutes) was not a part of the episode (which, without it, runs exactly 15 minutes). The shortness of the scheduled timeslot precludes an additional sketch.

The Macmillan sketch has now been positively identified as being from an edition of The News Huddlines broadcast on 5th November 1975, nearly a year earlier, which was a political sketch comedy series. Perhaps the confusion arose because Burkiss regular Chris Emmett was also in The News Huddlines.

Lesson 28 (Ignore Programme Titles the Burkiss Way) : One sketch in the original broadcast, suggesting that ITV newscaster Reginald Bosanquet didn't mind the occasional "tipple", was cut from all repeats, because he complained !

Lesson 41 (Eric Pode of Croydon’s Easter Special) : Broadcasts have been rare because it's a Christmas Special. As such it does not fit in with the rest of the series, as the show has rarely been repeated such that Episode 41 would coincide with Christmas. When repeats have coincided with Christmas, the BBC has prefered to repeat the show's other Christmas Special instead.

Lesson 47 (Wave Goodbye To CBEs the Burkiss Way) : The final episode. Many jokes in the original broadcast (about the Queen Mother's birthday), lampooning the BBC's grovelling attitude to Royalty, were cut from all subsequent repeats. Today the episode continues to be broadcast in its cut form when repeated on its own, despite being occasionally aired in its full original form as part of the 3 hour special entitled Celebrate the Burkiss Way.

A lot of effort has gone into finding and presenting here the original versions of the episodes.

So far as possible, the recordings on this page are uncut, which has not been easy: details are given above of the long-term cuts to certain episodes, which began with the very first repeats in the 1980s (but the Reginald Bosanquet episode, Lesson 28, has proved impossible to find in its original form).

In addition, modern radio repeats of many episodes have suffered censorship cuts for political correctness.

Nevertheless, every modern repeat presented on this page is believed to be uncut. This has involved some compromises: in some cases it has been necessary to source the recordings from repeats which aired on BBC 7 (also known as Radio 7) before the latest cuts began, and those broadcasts were at lower bitrates. The episodes affected are mainly presented here at 128 kbps only.

Better quality recordings turn up from time to time, and will be added here as they become available.

UPDATE on 12 September 2025

1. Two existing mp3 recordings of Lesson 13, which were both incomplete, have been deleted.

2. One file has been added : A complete recording of Lesson 13 (an mp3 @ 128 kbps). In fact, a preliminary check indicates that the existing recordings already included an mp3 @ 192 Kbps which is uncut.

3. The two recordings of Lesson 13 included now each have a Continuity Announcement from the original broadcast at the start, and the 192 Kbps recording also has one at the end. And they do not suffer from the cuts made to Lesson 13 in recent repeats. For these reasons, both run longer than the deleted versions.

4. This preservation project is fraught with difficulties. The cuts found in Lesson 13 are only the latest problem to emerge, having gone unnoticed until now because they were present in the 2019 repeat, unsuspected, as few shows suffered cuts before 2020. This implies there may yet be further undetected cuts still to be identified in other episodes that I preserved from the repeats aired before 2020.

5. Additional recordings have been added to Series 5. For details, please consult the downloads page (using this link or the "SHOW ALL" link in the right-hand sidebar near the top of the current page): the files added can be identified from their timestamps, shown in the right-hand column on that page, which will show the same date as this update (i.e. 12-Sep-2025). The only relevent timestamps are those of the .m4a and .mp3 media files.

Notes

None of the media files on this page were automatically generated by the archive's systems.

There are so many problems with preserving this particular radio show that I have taken to using this page to archive any and all recordings that I can find, such that it has become a sort of central clearing house for the show. I only occasionally replace older recordings with newly found ones of better quality: normally I merely add the new recording.

For individual episodes, if there is a choice of sources to listen to I suggest you might prefer to try the recording with the longest duration: these tend to have extra audio content -- it's not usually just an identical recording running at the wrong speed!